Happy New Year!
Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know that I am time poor but absolutely bursting at the seams with ideas. For every Static Canvas video I put out, there is an ever growing list of a dozen more concepts that never quite make it to the writing stage. Sometimes its because the premise doesn’t quite fit a video format, other times it’s the sheer volume of labour required to do it justice.
Over the past few months I’ve been thinking about how actually the part of video production I enjoy the most is writing. There was a time when I was pursuing this as a tangible career path, I used to intern for a website penning articles about gaming and tech, and even interviewed a few moderately famous people during my time there. Being honest, it was a bit of a frustrating experience. I found that the things I was passionate about were at odds with the site’s understandable drive to get a good click through rate for their posts. No doubt this is an irksome element that many others share, and I eventually found my niche on YouTube (as well as getting a job in healthcare that I really genuinely love), but I think I missed something critical during those years. A lesson I wish to continue learning with this newsletter:
Dozens are better than hundreds. Hundreds are better than thousands. The measure of success burned into our heads by the business hive mind is a critical falsehood that values quantity over quality. It’s less interested in the individual experience of it’s user base than the sheer volume of attention it can attract. I do not want this to be a motivating factor in my work. It isn’t fair on me, it certainly isn’t fair on you.
So here’s the pitch for the Static Canvas substack:
I will be posting on here the things that don’t quite fit the remit of my YouTube output. Every week, on a Sunday, I will upload a piece of writing of comparable quality to what can be found on my channel. It might be about games, or other mediums, or even general cultural musings. I will also periodically be using this platform to reccomend the work of my fellow creators. Shorter posts about their writing, art or video work and why I think it’s worth engaging with.
The ultimate goal of this project is to provide things that I believe are worth reading, in a format that is more manageable for the amount of free time I have. Any new videos I bring out I will also post on here, with a few behind-the-scenes scribblings for those who might be interested.
I hope this proposal suits your needs too. Nothing put up on this site will take more than 10-15 minutes to read. Nothing will require more than a smartphone and a set of eyes. If I do link anything external, it won’t be critical to the writing itself.
Let’s see how this all goes
All the best
Tom
Excited to see where this goes.